


There Were Some Bumps Along the Way

by cuddliestcactus



Series: A Good Life [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: BAMF Darcy Lewis, Established Relationship, Friendship, Head Injury, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Rescue, Yoda Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-15
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 22:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1958988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddliestcactus/pseuds/cuddliestcactus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma didn’t think it was her head wound that was causing her words to get caught in her throat. “You let yourself get captured to make sure I was alright?”</p><p>Darcy squeezed her hand. “Like I said, we’re friends, right? Besides, I like the odds of Captain America and the Winter Soldier’s girlfriends getting rescued.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello All! This goes with my other story, A Good Life. Not super necesarry to have read that one, but it is still recommended.
> 
> People wanted more Darcy/Steve and Jemma/Bucky togetherness and this is what happened when I told my brain to write that. This will be some of those "rough patches" from Jemma and Bucky's relationship before they got pregnant.

“Mother fucking, cock sucking goat turds!”

Jemma’s eyes flew open at what was most definitely not her alarm clock only to find herself in what was definitely not her and James’ bed room in their new apartment.

No, definitely not their room. She thinks James would have mentioned installing video cameras in the corner.

Probably.

Speaking of James, he was nowhere to be found. Instead, the person currently trying to jimmy the hinges of the only door in the room with a tooth brush was none other than lab manager extraordinaire, Darcy Lewis.

Jemma sat up from where she had been laying on very stained pallet only to have the world begin to gray at the edges as a wave of dizziness washed over her.

“Oh! Jemma, don’t get up! Your head only just stopped bleeding like twenty minutes ago. Your pulse was strong, though, and I kept your spine as still as I could and everything. I don’t want the Winter Soldier coming after me because I let you get paralyzed,” Darcy had abandoned her escape via tooth brush efforts and had come over to ease Jemma back onto the pallet. Once she was satisfied that Jemma was going to stay down, her words caught back up to her. Her eyes widened and she rushed to tell Jemma, “Not that I wouldn’t have helped you, anyway! You’re my friend and one of the only super geniuses I know that can feed and water themselves and generally be a functioning human being. It’s just that, God love him, James can be scary as pants when he wants to be and he loves you like Eugene and Rapunzel, for reals. Like he would totally cut your magic hair. If that was a thing.”

She trailed off with a suspicious look at Jemma and asked, very seriously, “You’d tell me if there was magic hair in a SHIELD lab somewhere, right?”

Jemma was really having trouble processing the situation. She liked Darcy, she really did, and had spent quite a bit of time with her seeing as they were both dating two super soldiers whose friendship was approaching its centennial. She and Darcy had struck up a friendship of their own and had had their own adventures over which to bond (although no one is to ever mention the pork tenderloin incident under any circumstances), but even Jemma’s history with Darcy didn’t bring her any closer to understanding the woman a lot of the time.

Jane had assured that that was normal.

The pounding headache that Jemma was only just becoming aware of was also not helping matters. So Jemma just told Darcy yes and tried to piece together what had happened.

“Where…where are we?” Jemma’s voice was small and timid compared to the loud brashness of Darcy’s. One could make the mistake of viewing Darcy as the stronger of the two, but they would be wrong. To each their own coping mechanism and all that.

Jemma gently turned her aching head to observe her surroundings. Like she had noticed earlier, there was a single door to the room and absolutely no windows. There was another little pallet aside from the one she was laying on just next to Darcy. In the corner opposite the video camera, there was a little curtained off section. Underneath the curtains she could see the base of a toilet and what must have been a sink. She imagined that was where Darcy had found the tooth brush or else her friend had become very paranoid about dental hygiene and had taken to carrying supplies with her. Jemma believed that would have come up in conversation.

“I don’t know where we are. The wall at the lab exploded and shrapnel from that hit your head, knocked you clean out,” Darcy paused and grabbed Jemma’s hand before continuing, “There was a lot of blood. I was trying to stem the flow when a troop of armed and buff men stormed into the room through the wreckage. I didn’t know if you were okay, just that you were bleeding and unconscious, and I didn’t exactly trust the Brawn Unit to take your health into consideration so I said I’d go willingly if they just let me stay conscious to take care of you. Surprisingly, they agreed. Threw a bag over my head while in transport, but still.”

Jemma didn’t think it was her head wound that was causing her words to get caught in her throat. “You let yourself get captured to make sure I was alright?”

Darcy squeezed her hand. “Like I said, we’re friends, right? Besides, I like the odds of Captain America and the Winter Soldier’s girlfriends getting rescued.”

“Is that why they took us from the lab, do you think? I mean, our connection to them?” Jemma cursed her blow to the head. Not only because of, well, pain, but also because it meant she hadn’t been awake to gather important information in order to make these deductions herself.

“I’m not sure. I feel like most of the enemies that hate both Steve and James died 70 years ago. James hasn’t exactly been cleared for Avengers work for all that long. Everything he’s been doing has been a hell of a lot more covert.”

That was true. James had worked smaller scale missions with Steve or Natasha, like the ill-fated caper into Jemma’s lab that had introduced them. Besides those, he had only been a part of one battle with the Avengers thus far and even that had only been doom bots; giant geckos that had been more amusing than terrifying especially after Tony had hacked their programming to respond with ‘15 minutes could save you 15%’ whenever Doom tried give them orders.

“It could be HYDRA. It would hardly be the first time I’ve been taken by them. How long have we been in here?” Jemma tried to focus. She knew that she should be trying her best to figure things out, but the pain in her head was getting progressively worse. Her head’s pulsations were making everything go a bit fuzzy, for lack of a better word.

“We’ve been in here maybe two hours. I’m guessing because they took my watch and anything that could be useful once we got in here. The pat down was way unpleasant, to be honest.”

A loud crash quickly followed by gunfire interrupted their pow wow. Darcy smiled at Jemma. “Told you. We rate a pretty impressive cavalry by anyone’s standards.”

Jemma tried to smile back, but her head felt as though it were about to burst along the lambdoid suture so she was afraid her expression was closer to a grimace.

“Jemma? Hey, lady, stay with me.” Darcy’s voice was getting fainter as her vision grew dimmer.

The last thing Jemma saw was the door bursting inwards from the force of a metal fist.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, THANK YOU for the response to this and A Good Life! Everyone has been awesome and sweet and yeah.
> 
> Secondly, if you go for this type of thing, accompanying song to this chapter is Bloodstream by Ed Sheeran.
> 
> Thirdly, this is unbeta'd so please let me know if you see a mistake!

James actually had showered in the last fifteen hours. It wasn’t like in the movies where the worried lover couldn’t bear to leave the hospital bedside where their beloved rested. There was no swelling music to tell him exactly when she would wake up. No movie magic to make Jemma look like she was just sleeping.

No. It wasn’t anything like that.

In the real world, the worried lover couldn’t stand the thought of his dirty, bloodied hands anywhere near his beloved who was so bruised and so pale, unconscious from the heady combination of medications and rigors of surgery. So James had gone down the hall of the SHIELD med bay to an unoccupied room where he could use the bathroom and quickly, methodically clean up. 

Of course, he only did this once Jemma had made it through surgery in the small window of time when she was being moved from the OR to her room. He had stepped out right as they were carefully wheeling her bed around the corner of the hallway. The nurses looked startled to find him waiting, probably wondering how he had gotten back into this restricted area before even their patient had. They obviously had no idea with whom they were dealing.

The same could not be said for the surgeons and the nurses in the operating room. They had known with exacting clarity just how important the woman they were operating on was.

It might have been because of Fitz bursting into the room in full scrubs almost as soon as they had Jemma prepped that gave away her importance. It may have been the entire team of Avengers pacing in the waiting room. It might have been the Director of SHIELD himself standing at furious attention in the observation deck.

Despite all of these reasons, the most likely explanation for the operating teams’ awareness was that the Winter Soldier himself carried the woman into the OR. Not that they could known this, but from the time he had gingerly picked her up in that dingy room with Darcy, had gone back to the quinjet, had let Tony scan her on the flight back to headquarters, had listened to the frantic calls to have the operating room prepped and ready, James had held Jemma close. As soon as the gears had touched the landing pad, James was out of the jet and running to the med bay, Avenger’s and one harrowed lab manager hot on his heels.

Once he had her settled onto the table, he had stepped back to let the docs do their job, only going so far as the corner of the room. It was a testament to the severity of Jemma’s situation that the staff and Fitz overlooked his presence.

Tony’s scans had revealed hemorrhaging in Jemma’s skull. James doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the feeling of holding her completely limp form as Tony’s voice muttered “Her brain’s bleeding out, shit, it’s bleeding…” as he interfaced with Jarvis.

Even now, safe in a hospital room, just remembering it was enough to force his head into his hands. He took deep breaths and when that didn’t help, he reached out to touch on her arm were it rested at her side., feeling her pulse beat at her wrist. James had known a lot of pain in his life, but he had never really felt fear like he had today. 

Sure, growing up, he had worried about Steve given that moron’s propensity for stupid actions and his many ailments, but he had felt the youthful combination of invincibility and naiveté that inhibited any concrete fear. During the War, he had again worried after Steve and the commandos, but they had all been so strong and good. Steve, especially. And James had learned something about himself.

He was damn good at war. He had been to enough therapy to be able to recognize that that darkness had been a part of him long before HYDRA had gotten their talons in him. There was some work in war that was hard and gritty, done in the mud where no one could see. It was necessary work, but it wasn’t the kind of work that people like Steve could do.

Those spaces were where people like James slipped in and did the job. And people like James didn’t have time for things like fear.

They had to be detached; had to be calculating; had to be machines.

It was that part of him that James had been stripped to while being the Winter Soldier. The ruthlessly effective machine that got the job done, no matter what. 

But today? Today, he had only known love which had given away to fear as he held the woman who, in turn, held his heart and listened to all of the brilliant geniuses around him talk of how near death she was if they didn’t get her to doctors immediately.

Footsteps echoing down the hallway had him out of his chair and facing the door in a half second. He’s realistic enough to know that this hyper awareness and caution will be his defining characteristics for a while.

It’s Darcy Lewis that comes skidding in the room and James can’t say he expected her to be the first visitor.

“James,” she seemed to register his defensive posture because she hesitated for only a moment before visibly steeling herself and moving further into the room “How is she?”

James wished he could feel guilty about not having thought to check on Darcy, a victim just like his Jemma by all rights, but he couldn't summon the strength. He sighed and sat back down, motioning for Darcy to take the chair next to him. “Fitz said they were able to relieve the pressure in good time, but we won’t know for sure until she wakes up. Chances are good for a full recovery, though. He said that you mentioned she had been awake and lucid which is apparently a good sign.”

Darcy’s whole being looses a tension that he hadn’t noticed and she practically melted into the chair. “Thank God,” she breathed, “I was so relieved when the bleeding finally stopped and she woke up, but then she passed out right before you guys made with your heroics and I just…” A few tears slipped down her cheeks. “I was scared that she wouldn’t make it and it all would have been for nothing.”

James lifted the arm closest to her, the metal one, and pulled her chair to him so he could get an arm around her shoulders. He had liked Darcy right from the start, liked any one who would just as soon tell you they loved ya as they would tell you to fuck off, and he appreciated that she didn’t seem fazed at all about Captain America. The dame loved the hell outta Steve Rogers, though.

Something about her speech confused him. “What do you mean, all for nothing?”

Darcy sniffled and burrowed into his shoulder, uncaring about the cool, unyielding metal and seeming to find comfort in him regardless. “I mean going with them.”

He almost wished he could see her face to try and understand her better, but he knew from experience that it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. “They had guns and a lot of scary men, Darce. Of course you were going with them.”

“Actually, I don’t think they cared about me like at all. They only had eyes for Jemma after they blew up that wall. I went to her because I saw that she was down on the floor with rubble all around her. Even passed some of them on my way to get her; they could have kept me from her. They clearly didn’t think I was a threat or anything.”

James furrowed his brow. “Wait, went passed them? You mean you could have just slipped out behind them without them knowing? You could have gotten out safely?”

Darcy went very still. “I couldn’t just leave her like that. She was bleeding all over the floor surrounded by dangerous men. I had to make sure she was okay.”

James’ remembered a story that Steve had told him, back when they had first been reunited after the collapse of SHIELD. James had been a mess, unable to reach some memories or unable to place other ones that he did have. Steve spent a lot of those first few weeks holed up with him telling him stories. One particularly bad night after James had woken up screaming and grasping for a blue gloved hand that was just out of reach, Steve had been quiet as he tried to regain himself.

Once James had calmed down a bit, he asked Steve if that had been how he died, falling through the snowy air and looking up at a train speeding away. Steve closed his eyes and said yes.

Steve told him about trying to drink the memory away in a bombed out shell of a pub. Of a beautiful woman, wiser by half than all of the men around her, telling Steve to allow his friend the dignity of his choice.

James thinks this might be like that. Half of him wants to shake Darcy for being so reckless; the other half wants to weep at her feet in gratitude. He settles for “Thank you. For keeping her safe, even if you have the survival instinct of gnat.”

Darcy shoots him a watery smile and asks him not to tell Steve.

James laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm iamkatebishop on Tumblr if you want to come say hi!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marvel owns it all. Damn them.
> 
> As always, let me know if you spot any mistakes, please and thank you!

“…like they wanted her to work in that lab… lots of test tubes…needed her…”

Jemma really wished that whoever was talking so incessantly would shut the hell up. If she could just get her eyes to open, she could give whoever they were a proper telling off.

On second thought, the ache in her head would need to subside before she could do any telling, off or otherwise. As that ache became more focused in the back of her skull, she let out a soft groan of pain.

The voice abruptly cut off and a new person, a very familiar person, spoke carefully into her ear, “Jem, doll, you wakin’ up?”

James.

She opened her eyes and all she could see was him, but not in some melodramatic way where he was the sun and the stars and thus all she could see. Jemma was more literal than that and never had been one to wax poetic. No, all she saw was James because he was hunched over her so completely there could only have been a few millimeters between their noses.

Not that she minded.

“Where are we?”

Before James could answer her, she had the most terribly sense of déjà vu and suddenly recalled the grimy little room that she and Darcy had been trapped in and frantically began looking around her. She tried to sit up, but the ache in her head roared to a full fledged battering. James was there immediately, a hand cradling her neck to support her head and the other at her shoulder to ease her back.

“Darcy,” Jemma managed to choke out through the haze of pain, “Where’s Darcy?”

“She’s fine, Jemma, she’s alright. She was here earlier, but she left to go change clothes and get some rest.” With the knowledge that her friend was alright, Jemma allowed herself to fully relax back into her bed, her head thanking her for the effort with a decrease in the throbbing.

James left his hands where they were and kept his body over hers all the while. He didn’t seem too keen on allowing any space to come between them. She met his eyes and noticed the circles under them first. The way his attention kept darting from her own eyes to the base of her head to a full sweep of her prone form under the blankets and back again was the next thing that registered with her. Finally, she saw Coulson just over James’ shoulder, hanging back only enough to give a modicum of privacy, but still well within range of her bed.

She looked back at James and, not without some effort, raised her hand to his cheek to stop his frantic perusal of her person. “What happened? The last I remember I was talking to Darcy in some decrepit holding cell.”

James gently placed his forehead on hers, consciously not putting any weight on her head, and took a deep breathe. “AIM took you. When I first got the call from the headquarters saying your lab had been blown to bits, all I could think was that my demons had come to roost. Turns out that was a little self-centered of me,” James did deprecating humor about as well as Tony Stark. Which is to say, not well. “We don’t know the full picture yet, just that they had a lab full of organic material. Considering that’s your specialty, it’s pretty safe to assume they needed you for something lab-related.”

“Oh.” Jemma felt the oddest sense of relief that it had been because of whom she was, rather than whom he was, that she had been taken. Not because it appealed to her vanity or anything quite like that, but more because of how this wouldn’t add to her boyfriend’s considerable feelings of guilt.

She knew he had done horrific things, the kinds of acts that clawed at the soul, actions ordered by those with only a specter of humanity left. She had read the files, every available file, after their first meeting and she was smart enough to know that the worst would have been kept off the record, never put into writing.

Instead, it was put into James’ nightmares that left him shaking in the dark, crying tears to wash away the blood and apologizing to people long passed being able to hear, but Jemma could listen. And she did. She held him in the dead of night while he pleaded for absolution into her skin.

In those moments, while the dark had them in its grasp, her words didn’t always matter. She used to try, in the beginning, to tell him how it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t in control. She had the science to prove it, the experience to prove it, and the love to prove it. James could never listen, not when he had just been trapped in his own memories and emotions. So she would wait until morning.

She’d let the sun chase away the shadows, content to let the light through the window warm the cracks she couldn’t. Once the room was awash in light, she’d speak. It was only then, in the morning’s glow, that James could really absorb her words, her meaning. She would speak about how electricity, when combined with specific chemicals, could deaden neurons and thus dampen memories. Without one’s memories and experiences, there is nothing to inform one’s decisions or context to shape one’s world. Not to mention how he had never been given a choice. 

She’d go on about the science and even the psychology of it all. He had told her once, on an early date where she had accidentally rambled on about some experiment or another, that he liked her “science talk”. He said it was calming, how focused she became when talking about her work and how much she clearly loved discovering new knowledge. She thought that it helped in these mornings, as well. 

Once she finished with the technicalities of it all, she moved on to all the ways that he showed the kind of man he truly was now that he had control over himself. How he helped Steve adapt to the future one tweet and status update at a time; how he’d stay up with Clint on nights when thoughts of clouded eyes and blue light kept the archer awake; how he helped Natasha uncover her own past even though it led to painful remembrances in his own life; how he watched all of the Harry Potter movies with Skye even though he can’t understand why Dumbledore would have left Harry with the Dursley’s; how he went through the traditional Asgardian grieving ritual of getting shitfaced with Thor after Loki’s death then again with the discovery of Loki being alive and yet again when Loki disappeared after said discovery; how he let Fitz get away with giving him the evil eye and a rather explicit shovel talk the day before Jemma and James’ first date.

And after all of that, she’d tell him about how he had to be a good man, in order to love her the way he did. She’d end it the same way, every morning after a nightmare.

“Because you do love me, don’t you?”

He’d smile, and if his eyes were still a little watery, neither of them would comment on it, and reply “Course I do, doll. Like I’ve never loved anything else”.  
And that was the man, clearly run ragged, that she found herself forehead to forehead with in this SHIELD medbay. “Oh,” she said again.

Coulson cleared his throat from behind James in that discreet way of his. The man was Director of a powerful, clandestine agency, yet he was the singular most unobtrusive person Jemma had ever met. The contradiction never failed to amuse her.

James slowly raised himself from his crouch over her, but he kept one hand under her neck, thumb at her pulse point behind her ear. Jemma smiled at Coulson.

“I’m glad you’re awake and alright. I need my two heads of R&D fully functioning,” he joked with a soft grin.

Jemma looked between the two men and accidentally applied pressure to the sore portion of her skull. “What exactly is wrong with my head?” she asked through a wince.

She felt James’ fingers tighten ever so slightly at her question, but his voice was even as he answered her, “You had an epidural hematoma. The explosion sent debris that hit you in the head, knocked you unconscious. We got you to surgery quick enough to relieve the pressure. Fitz says you’ll have a headache for a few days and need to take it real easy, but you’ll be ok.”

The monotonous way James had delivered her diagnosis told her enough.

While she may be on bed rest for the foreseeable future, she thinks she’ll have plenty to do when it comes to soothing the emotions of one James Buchanan Barnes.

But what else are lovers for?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm iamkatebishop on Tumblr, stop by and say hi!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it has been so long! Real life is terrifying and, you know, time consuming. But here it is!! Some old geezer brotp!

James had been sitting in the dark for two hours. It may have been three in the afternoon, but he had drawn all of the curtains on the windows and turned all of the lights out so that Jemma could rest undisturbed. He had angled the chair so that he could see her as she slept in their bed while still keeping an eye on the front door.

He had been relieved that they were going home from the hospital because even his enhanced biology was having trouble coping with the total lack of sleep. Jemma had been held another three days and James had been awake for every hour of them. There had been basically no chance of him leaving Jemma’s side, no matter how ‘protected’ and ‘secure’ the SHIELD medbay was.

Her lab had been just as secure and protected, yet look how well that had turned out.

The medbay predictably was not conducive to James’ sleeping needs. He didn’t have problems sleeping generally, but he also generally slept in a room with which he was intimately familiar. And that had 3 hand guns. And an AK-47. And 19 knives.

And two sawed off shot guns, but those were only for special occasions. 

Not to mention, he usually had a soft and sweet smelling biochemist curled up against his chest. In the face of all that, the medbay couldn’t compare. Jemma had known he was going on fumes if her concerned glances and attempts to coax him into laying on her tiny little hospital bed were any indication. He’d been able to put her off so far because, well, she was recovering from goddamn brain surgery.

The reminder of how Jemma’s skull had been cut open, how she had come close to bleeding out in her brain so severely that she’d nearly…

She’d almost…

The tearing of plush leather under his metal hand pulled him out of those spiraling thoughts. ‘Damn it,’ he thought. This was his favorite chair.

He got up to examine the damage but was distracted by the sounds of footsteps coming up to his front door. Grabbing a SIG from the end table next to the couch, he shut the bedroom door and silently made his way to the front door. All of this was done in a matter of seconds, so he was at the security screen in time to see Steve lifting his hand to knock. He opened the door before Steve could make contact with the wood and wake Jemma.

Steve stood there with his hand still suspended and let out a surprised “Hey, Buck.” His eyes immediately fell to the gun in James’ hand. “Expectin’ someone else?”

“Can never be too safe, punk.” Steve’s brow furrowed as he walked through the door. James swears Steve didn’t always have such an atrocious poker face. In fact, he could recall with perfect clarity (something that wasn’t the rarity it used to be for James) a few times when Steve had used his blustering, shy, ‘aw shucks’ persona to get out of tight scrapes at the orphanage. There had been this kid, Billy Garrett, who was notorious for peeking up the girls’ skirts. Billy got away with it, even when the girls cried, because Billy’s actions were just viewed as ‘a boy being a boy.’ None of that ever sat well with little Stevie Rogers, who was smaller than most of those same girls. The day Billy got out of the shower to find all of his pants and underwear gone, no one ever suspected sweet and innocent Steve as being the one who had hid them behind the trash out back.

Billy smelled like rotten eggs for weeks.

Despite all of that, Steve never could do anything but wear his every damn emotion on his face. Asking him to lie? Jesus, you’d have a problem even if he managed to not turn as red as Natalia’s hair.

James thought it might be because of the serum. Steve had never been cold or unfeeling, far from it, but James noticed he seemed feel a hell of a lot more after Erskine. At the time, he had chocked it up to war and almost losing his best friend, but maybe there really had been some part of the serum that enhanced not only his body, but also his mind. 

Not that it mattered. Steve was Steve and Steve was always his best friend. Even at his blankest and most calculating like on that helicarrier, James had known that on some basic level.

Right now, his friend was clearly trying his best for nonchalance as he settled himself on the couch. Steve tried to not look at the mangled armchair, but his eyes kept darting over to it only for Steve to quickly turn his head like he was just doing a casual sweep of the room.

Yeah, Captain America would never be cut out for spy work.

James put the gun away and double checked that the bedroom door was shut securely before sitting down as well.

James normally would have let Steve earn his gold at the Awkward Olympics because there was nothing so satisfying as a bumbling Cap, but he really was exhausted. He didn’t think he had the energy to properly enjoy that spectacle.

“So what’s your mission here?”

Steve affecting what he thought was a bewildered expression always came out more like deranged scientist, eerily similar to Tony on day four of a science bender. “Mission? What mission? What does that even mean?” Steve’s fake laugh was even worse. Like a choking parakeet.

“Seriously, I will never understand how you managed to evade HYDRA forces before the Battle of the Triskellion. How lousy are you at poker now? Please don’t tell me you’ve ever tried. Save yourself that embarrassment.”

“Hey! The entire HYDRA Strike team walked right by me, I’ll have you know!” Steve looked indignant for all of two seconds before his shoulders sagged and he added, “Mostly because of Natasha, fine.”

James feels the first smile in days coming out on his face. “I know Natalia’s methods. Hell, I taught Natalia those methods. Please tell me there’s video of that somewhere.”

The tips of Steve’s ears turned red and he mumbled something that sounded a lot like “Darcy only just stopped teasing me about this, come on…”

James leaned in closer. “Darcy? Darcy has the video? That seems amazing and dangerous. Think she’d let me watch?”

Steve threw his hands in the air and glared. “No, Bucky. No. That’s not why I’m here. You’re right, there is a reason, and that reason is not my excellent moral fiber that makes lying a problem for me. So there.”

James would have much preferred to talk about Steve’s terrible acting skills. It had been nice to think about something other than the last few days. But James had never been a coward in any of his incarnations so he’d face it head on.

“Alright, then what’s eatin’ ya, Steve?”

The Captain America glare was fierce to be sure, but it had nothing on the Sincere Steve Rogers look. “Jemma called.” 

James wondered when the hell Jemma had been able to call Steve considering he had been at her side near constantly. Steve smiled at his confusion and clarified. “She said she had convinced you to get proper tea from one of the break rooms. She made a very big deal about having a small window of time in which to talk to me. Seemed proud of herself for having gotten you out of the room. Considering I know exactly how Mother Hen you can be from my asthma days, I was properly impressed.”

James scowled at his shoes. “So sorry for caring that the people I love could have died. What an inconvenience.”

“Hey,” Steve knocked his shoulder, “You know it’s not like that. She was worried.”

James kept his gaze resolutely on the toes of his boots. “She’s the one who’s hurt. She doesn’t need to be worried.”

Steve had his understanding voice on. James was painfully familiar with that one. “She loves you, so she’s gonna worry about you no matter what. If she wasn’t still recovering from major surgery, then she probably wouldn’t have called me in. Jemma’s very much a do-it-yourself kind of girl. It’s part of why I never worried about her when you guys started dating.”

That earned a chuckle from James. “You liked that she could assemble her own Ikea furniture?”

“Shut up. No, although I’m sure she could. I liked that she tackled problems and fixed them herself. She never doubts that she is enough to get something done. I thought that fit with you really well, actually. Not that you’re broken or a problem that needed to be fixed, but more that you needed support. Jemma wouldn’t shy away from that. She’d get right to the core of it and as soon as she figured out what you needed, she’d help you.”

James thought about all the times she’s helped him remember how he is more than just the Asset and thought Steve didn’t know the half of it.

“Yeah,” James cleared the gruffness out of his throat, “Yeah, she does.”

“And because she’s a smart dame, she knows that in her condition, she can’t make you talk it out with her. So I’m here.”

“You don’t have to… I mean, your girl got taken, too. You don’t need to be here coddling me.”

Steve kicked the foot James had been so intently staring at for that last comment. Hard.

“Darce is fine. I mean, she is being very avoidant but that’s only because she thinks I don’t know about her little hero act. Eventually, she’ll realize I watched the surveillance tapes and definitely saw her run straight into the danger because that’s where Jemma was, but she and I’ll talk about it then. I don’t like it, but I can’t exactly blame her for protecting her friend. It’d make me a damn hypocrite. Second, this isn’t coddling, you mook. This is called being a friend. Your girl almost died.”

On the word ‘died’, James shut his eyes and went completely still. Steve, being no idiot, knew avoidance when he saw it. He still spoke as softly as he could, as if his tone could help temper the content.

“That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? She almost died.”

James moved to get up, get away, get any place where he wouldn’t have to hear this, but Steve put a hand on his shoulder.

It was his metal shoulder. He could get out from under Steve’s hand, but there was something about that hand that was grounding. Steve continued on unperturbed. “It’s hard, having to face the reality that the woman you love, the woman who keeps you tethered to this world could be gone. Just like that.”

James didn’t want to hear this. Didn’t want to be swept away by all the thoughts of What if, what if what if?

“I’ve been here before, Buck. It wasn’t exactly this, Darcy was never near death or anything like that. It was just appendicitis. A stupid little problem that was easily fixed up in no time. Hell, Darce was really excited about getting to eat jello at the hospital and was too busy conning the nurses out of all of their stash to be bothered at all at having emergency surgery. I was sitting there, laughing at her as she convinced the fourth nurse that day that she hadn’t had any dessert, no ma’am, when it all of a sudden hit me that I’d never get appendicitis. You’d think that was a good thing because it’s not like it looked fun, but my brain just kind of ran with it. I’d never get appendicitis or the flu or cancer or anything. Ever. But Darcy? She could get any of those. She could get all of them. I sat there, completely oblivious to everyone and every thing around me as I realized that Darcy, my beautiful, loud, irreplaceable girl, could get so many things that I never would. The world was full of things that could take her from me. I nearly bowled over the nurse as I ran out of there like a bat outta hell, but I had to get away, Buck. I couldn’t run fast enough.”

James hadn’t known about any of this. He remembered reading in her file that Darcy had had an appendectomy a couple months before Steve had found him again. He never thought it was anything important. At the time, he had been doing a background check on his friend’s girlfriend because he was only recently out of HYDRA’s grasp and paranoid as hell. Routine surgeries hadn’t ranked with him as something to be worried about.

“What…” James was having trouble getting his words out, a problem he hadn’t had since his first few weeks back with Steve, “What did you do? To make the thoughts stop?”

Steve squared his shoulders and looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “Well. I didn’t for a while. It was almost like I had to get the panic out of my system. I ran for hours and went through every possible situation where I could lose her. It was…suffocating. For the first time since the serum, I really struggled for breath, but I just kept going. Eventually, though, I had a thought that made the rest of them quiet.”

“What was it?” James shifted infinitesimally towards his friend.

“That if Darcy was taken tomorrow, I didn’t want to have wasted any time panicking instead of living my life with her.”

James was silent for a heartbeat before, “That was a lot more morbid than I was expecting, punk.” But the thought was cleansing for his mind. He could feel some of the whirling slowing down.

“I mean, maybe if you wanna take it that way, but I think the smarter way to take it is that you need to make your time count. Realistically, you and I are more likely to die before our girls with the lives that we lead, but that should just make the time we do have all that more important. So don’t hide away and panic, go live your damn life, jerk.”

With that, Steve seemed talked out. He smiled at James and got up to let himself out. James didn’t pay much attention. His focus was on his bedroom door.

He got up and went into the bedroom to find Jemma sleeping peacefully, using a body pillow as a substitute for how she usually laid on his chest.

James stripped to his boxers and thought that Steve was right. He needed to just live his life.

And God, did he love his life, he thought as he settled Jemma onto his chest and closed his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's probably only one more chapter of the Jemma and her Head Injury escapades. I have other ideas for this series, so if y'all are at all interested in that, let me know in the comments, please!
> 
> As always, I'm iamkatebishop on Tumblr! Come say hi, I promise it would make my day!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guys! This is basically the last chapter, I just have a quick little epilogue planned (Skye! maybe Fitz!) after this. Thanks for being patient, y'all are the best.
> 
> Also bonus points for whoever gets the Daredevil reference

Jemma found herself in a pickle.

She knew she only had herself to blame. Her own pride and pig headedness.

She couldn’t steady her vision enough to find something around her that she could use for support. She was lucky she had been able to pathetically slide down the wall when the vertigo hit. She didn’t need any of her degrees to know how bad falling would be for someone who had recently had her head cut open.

Jemma had only wanted to get a snack. She woke up with an actual appetite rather than nausea, a first since the whole kidnapping ordeal. Instead of asking James who had been sleeping peacefully next to her to grab something from the kitchen, she had decided to do it herself.

The fact that he hadn’t so much as twitched as she got out of bed was a testament to how exhausted he was. Steve must have come by last night to talk some sense into her boyfriend because when she had passed out, James had still looked like a mother lioness on cocaine.

She had been so relieved that he was getting some well deserved rest that she stupidly got up to feed herself. Jemma had made it passed the living room before the world titled under her feet and the walls of their hallway appeared to bend in towards each other.

She knew that what she was seeing and feeling weren’t really happening, that it was just a side effect in her recovery, but that knowledge didn’t seem to be calming her body’s instinctual panic.

Closing her eyes made it worse and her head was starting to throb at her incision.

“Ja…” her breathing was too shallow to get the words out, “James! James!”

Her voice wasn’t loud enough to get the attention of a normal person deep in their REM cycle. Luckily, she wasn’t dating a normal person.

She heard the bedroom door crash open but did not hear a single footstep. He was always silent in tense moments, remnants from training he’d never completely abandon.

She’d long ago grown used to that so it was no surprise that he was already kneeling in front of her before she registered any noise.

“Hey, shh, you’re alright, Jem,” he was babbling almost absentmindedly as his eyes swept her person looking for any injury.

She managed to land a hand in the crook of his neck and tried to use his preternatural stillness to center her world. She managed to choke out a gruff “Dizzy,” and she felt his shoulder lose their tension under her fingers.

“Okay. We knew that might happen, right? That was on the list Fitz made. It was one of the less ridiculous possibilities on there. I don’t care about Fitz’s obsession with being thorough; gangrene was about as likely as Michael Bay letting a female character have any agency.”

That actually did take Jemma’s mind off of her rotating sense of balance.

“What on Earth are you talking about?”

James smiled and ducked his head so his face filled up more of her field of vision. A move she appreciated because his head was blocking out how the walls still looked to be moving behind him.

“You were out for a long time after surgery and I stopped responding to Darcy about an hour into our wait. She got off on some very enlightening tangents. I’m thinking about Bechdel testing all of my favorite movies from when I was a kid and comparing how they score to today’s movies. Probably about the same which is a damn shame.”

She rested her forehead on his and sighed out, “That sounds like a good way to pass my time on bed rest if you’d like assistance in your research.”

“You know I love it when you talk science to me, doll.” They rested there until Jemma felt like she could stand without throwing up the little that was in her stomach.

James clearly didn’t want to test her strength because as soon as she was semi-upright, he gently lifted her into his arms and moved back into the living room. 

“Now,” he said as he settled her in the corner of the couch against the back and the armrest, “What in God's name were you doing out of bed? You had some pretty major surgery if you remember?”

His voice was soft but still clearly conveyed what a bonehead idea he thought that had been. It made Jemma smile. “I woke up actually feeling hungry as opposed to wanting to lose the entire contents of my stomach so I went to get some food. I admit that I should have just woken you up to get the food for me as I clearly overestimated my current abilities.”

He brushed her hair back behind her ears and chuckled, “Yeah, Jem, you should have woken me up. Silly geniuses, thinking they can do everything…” His voice trailed off as he moved into the kitchen.

“I resent that! Don’t you dare lump me in with Tony and Jane, I am much more functional than them!” she scoffed.

“Maybe now isn’t the time to try and prove your survival skills given that you were tryin’ to walk your very injured self around like it was any other day?”

Jemma harrumphed and burrowed into the couch, content to listen to James move around the kitchen as he prepared her food. He was laughing, joking, making noise and that was enough to let her relax. He had been positively manic at the hospital. The only times his eyes had left her were to check the vulnerable points in her hospital room (air vents, window, door, one particular spot in the wall although she wasn’t sure what had made it vulnerable). She knew he wasn’t sleeping and she thought he might not have spoken if she hadn’t spoken to him first. 

Normally, she would be perfectly willing and able to comfort and reassure him, but she found that healing was more taxing than she had expected. She had a new appreciation for the resilience of some of the members of her team.

May never stayed down for long, not even after that lucky shot from crime boss Leland Owlsley had caught her in the shoulder. As soon as the bullet was out, she was doing her Tai Chi exercises next to her hospital bed. It had taken Coulson promising to take a week’s vacation to get May back in bed for the doctors to do their jobs.

Jemma was dozing when she heard Bucky come back in the room. She opened her eyes to see a plate of apples and some toast, and her stomach rumbled at the sight. He sat down close and carefully pulled her legs over his lap, setting the plate atop them both.

She grabbed his hand and laced their fingers. “You’re much more chipper. I’m happy Steve came through. Not that I doubted he would, one does not simply doubt Steve Rogers, but still. This is nice.”

James rolled his eyes playfully at her “Yes, Daddy Rogers came and pep talked me near to death.”

She nudged his thigh with the heel of her foot. He smiled, “Alright, alright, yes. I needed to be pep talked. Thank you for taking care of me even though you’re the one that needs to be cared for.”

She wiggled nearer so she could unfold their hands and wrap her arm around his neck, tucking her head into his shoulder. “You dolt. We take care of each other however much the other needs. That’s how this works.”

“I know, Jem. Partners. That’s how this works.”

“I love you, James.”

He laid a careful kiss just above her stitches, and replied “Love you, too, doll.”

She quietly began munching on her food, unable to resist her stomach’s call any longer.

James grabbed the remote, pulling up Starkflix, the “totally better and with way more movies and PEPPER, this is going to work great, come on, look at the cool layout!” knock off Netflix that Tony nagged everyone into trying. He searched until he found The Wizard of Oz and pressed play.

Jemma didn’t know where he pulled the notepad and pen out from, but she nearly choked on a piece of apple laughing when he loudly announced “Let the research commence!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> iamkatebishop.tumblr.com  
> Come one, come all!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're at the end! As usual, I own an awful lot of comics and Funko dolls, but sadly I still don't own the characters themselves. One day.
> 
> This next bit a just a small little closing chapter because I thought the lack of Skye had to be explained. And because I really like Skye.
> 
> Also, I'm iamkatebishop on Tumblr! Come say hi, I would love it!

Skye knew it was probably a bad idea to just waltz into the apartment of the Winter Soldier, but what else was she supposed to do?

She was gone for three days on a mission only to come back to her best friend having been kidnapped, rescued and operated on by what had to be the most iron stomached surgeons on the East Coast. Skye didn’t want to be overdramatic, but come. On. 

Clearly, SHIELD couldn’t last a week without her.

She had been briefed on the whole situation by Coulson while flying a red eye home, but by the time she had gotten to the medbay, Jemma had been gone.

Which was why she found herself knocking on James and Jemma’s apartment door for the last fifteen minutes. Honestly, the fact that a disgruntled James hadn’t opened the door swearing at her in Russian was alarming. She didn’t hear anything at all from inside.

So against her better judgment, she used the key that Jemma had given her for emergencies and slipped through the front door.

She had almost crept completely down the hall when there was suddenly a tickling at the back of her skull. She ducked and rolled just in time to miss the metal hand grabbing for her.

“Ha! In your wintery face, Jamesie!”

James smiled and extended a hand to help her up. “You’re getting faster, kiddo. Pretty soon you’ll be dodging bullets Keanu-style.”

Skye tried to reign in her preening at his praise, but still couldn’t help the smug grin as she regained her footing. “You know, I get back from… a totally classified locale only to find out that my best friend has gone through multiple traumas while I was away. So I come over here like the caring and worried friend that I am, only to have to practically break in since no one is answering the damn door.”

James rubbed his neck and avoided her gaze as he answers, “I, ah, was asleep.”

Skye almost dislocated her jaw with how hard it dropped. “You slept through me pounding on the door for a quarter of an hour? You who once complained that you couldn’t sleep because I was typing too loudly? From two rooms away?”

“That was one time, and I was mostly teasing you even though your typing sounds like a goddamn woodpecker going at steel. But yeah, I was dead asleep until I heard the door open. It’s been a long week.” He chuffed her on the top of the head as he led the way out of the hall. She followed silently in the wake of his bleak reminder.

“How is she?” she asked as they continued on to the kitchen.

James walked through the door and began to fill a pot at the sink for coffee. He set it to boil and pulled out the grounds for the French press before answering.

“She’s ok. Better. But,” he flexed each finger of the mechanical hand like a machine recalibrating itself, “It was bad. She almost died.”

Skye waited for the whirring of his arm to stop before ambling to where he was hunched over the counter. She shifted a shoulder to gently knock him off balance.

“So what I’m gonna take from that is she’s tough as some really tough nails and going to be battering us with science lectures in no time.”

James knocked her back as he reached for the hot kettle. “And that’s exactly what should be taken from this. Which, total disclosure, did take a couple days and a semi-scolding from Steve to get through my thick head. You, of course, don’t need any help understanding what’s important.”

The smell of thick coffee engulfed them as he filled the French press. “That’s the thing I admire most about you, kiddo.”

Skye leaned in to get one last waft of coffee before he placed the lid on the press. “What thing is that exactly, Obi Wan?”

James turned to face her and cocked a hip against the counter. “That thing where even though you’ve had a rough life, you’re still purposefully optimistic. Not in any naïve, fresh off the bus way, but more that you know exactly what you and those around you are capable of doing. Your knowing that means that even if the glass isn’t really half full, you always believe you can fill it up yourself.”

Skye felt the warmth in her chest that she had come to associate with her SHIELD family. She had long ago learned to give into that warmth, so she leaned into hug James.

“Knew I was your favorite. Wait until I tell Fitz.”

“You’re also the only person I’ve ever met who can ruin a moment faster than Barton,” James huffed into her hair. He gave her one last squeeze and moved to pour their coffee.

Armed with a steaming mug, she left James to cook breakfast and meandered over to the bedroom.

“Knock, knock, my sleeping biochemist,” Skye trilled as she pushed open the door. She heard a snuffling noise from the mound of bedding and carefully sat at the edge of the bed.

“Jemma,” she continued in a sickening sing-song voice, correctly assuming irritation was the way to wake her friend, “Oh, my sweet, disaster prone Jemma-bear!”

A hand emerged from a small hole in the folds of duvet. With it, came an unearthly groaning noise that seemed to reverberate from the caverns of Jemma’s blanket cocoon.

“There’s my little ray of sunshine! My petite and wounded scientist!” Skye went to playfully swat at Jemma’s hand, but was instead surprised to have the covers thrown to the side by Jemma herself.

There was a white bandage wrapped around Jemma’s head which would have taken her attention if not for the slow blinking of Jemma’s eyes and the furrowed nose. Skye thought she looked like nothing so much as a very stoned sloth.

“You,” Jemma croaked, “are not my boyfriend.”

“What gave me away? It was the hair, wasn’t it? James still will not tell me what conditioner he uses, but I’m convinced that’s the key to his grunge-chic aesthetic.”

“To be frank, I am not sure I have the energy for this yet. Now, if you please, leave me to my sleep.” Jemma tried to turn over, but Skye just laid down with her and snuggled closer.

“Only you would use complex syntax and the word ‘frank’ to say that you’re still sleepy. You know you missed me.”

Jemma just rearranged the duvet so that it covered both of them in response. Skye carefully linked their arms. “All kidding aside. You’re ok, right?”

Jemma turned her head towards her. “Yes. I’m having some dizzy spells, but I am really not in that much pain. I think it is because they were able to operate so quickly and the operation itself was more of a drainage procedure rather than anything terribly strenuous.”

“Still brain surgery, Jem.”

Jemma let out a soft sigh. “Yes, it’s still brain surgery. I’m sorry to have worried you.”

“No biggie. Just don’t do it again. Although you do have a sort of pattern. Jumping out of planes, jumping on grenades, being in cargo holds that are jumping ship, jumping into undercover HYDRA ops, …”

A yell of “She’s right, doll!” comes from the kitchen, but they both ignore him.

Jemma rolled her eyes with impressive force considering the state of her head. “The one with the cargo ship was reaching, don’t you think?”

“It was a masterful use of the English language.”

“Oh, please.”

Skye sits up to grab her coffee off of the nightstand, and they listen to James bumbling around the kitchen for a while.

“James seems alright, too. I kind of expected him to be falling apart,” Skye whispers, trying to avoid the supersoldier hearing.

Jemma knows James must have heard because he’s suddenly loudly humming off key to give them at least the illusion of privacy.

Skye reddens a bit, but still meets her gaze head on.

“He was, but he’s fine now. We always end up well.”

Jemma smiles as she smells the pancakes cooking on the stove.

Everything always worked out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap!
> 
> I hope y'all enjoyed this as much as I loved writing it. These characters are so wonderful and I hope I did them even half the justice their due.
> 
> Thanks for all of the kudos, messages and the comments. You guys have seriously been such great readers and the support has meant the world to me.
> 
> Let me know what you thought of the last bit below, pretty please!


End file.
